[Dixielandjazz] Will OKOM go to Laptops? Where is the music going/redux

[Steve barbone]

Oh my. What now? But then, please note the last line. At least panties are
still in so I guess my band, with our tossing those "Love Those Italian"
bikini bottoms, will continue for at least a while. :-) VBG.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

So Long, Garage Jammers. Nowadays Laptops Rock.

By DAVID CARR May 23, 2005 NY Times

Sitting in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan last week, Michael Cobden could
hardly be blamed for tapping his toe. It was a glorious spring day, and he
was playing hooky from his job as a restaurant manager on the Upper West
Side. Like a lot of people in the park, Mr. Cobden was enjoying a bit of
alfresco media, with a Mac G4 laptop and a set of headphones.

Except Mr. Cobden, 28, was not checking e-mail messages while listening to
music, he was creating a pop song called "Bryant Park." In doing so, Mr.
Cobden joined millions of people - trained musicians and amateurs alike -
who are using powerful laptop tools to produce music that in an earlier age
might have wailed out of a garage. "An artist is an artist, even if he is
using things he found or stole and arranging them in an artful fashion," he
said. "There are many composers who never played an oboe, but they write the
music and give it to an orchestra to play." For himself, Mr. Cobden tapped
the Mac in front of him lovingly. "I have a computer," he said.

"Computers are the new garage," said James Rotondi, the editor of Future
Music, a new magazine packaged with enough free software to get any would-be
Moby started. "A lot of people who are making music right now have never
recorded to tape. The concept is completely foreign to them."

Virtual music studio on the go: laptop and mini-keyboard.

Music recording, an arduous, analog process that has long been the province
of musician gearheads and studio savants, is being downsized and
democratized by a virtual array of digital sound loops, simulated
instruments and the notebook-size means to record them. The growing power of
laptop computers and new software means consumers have gone from listening
to music at the push of button to creating it with similar ease.

GarageBand, a user-friendly band-in-a-box made by Apple, came preinstalled
on 4.5 million Macs sold in the last 18 months. And Mr. Rotondi estimated
that hundreds of thousands of copies of Reason, a sound-creation application
produced by Propellerhead Software in Stockholm, have been sold, along with
many more pirated copies.

Laptop songs are being listened to as well: iCompositions, a Web site for
homemade music that is just over a year old, is adding about 36 songs a day
to a total of over 11,000 that have been listened to 1.5 million times. It
is enough home-brewed music to fill 43,000 iPods to the brim. (MacJams,
another online music site, has over 7,500 songs available for the
listening.) And several laptop jammers have been signed to major labels on
the strength of their digitized output. The line between the music consumer
and creator is shrinking to the point where the kid bopping his head on the
bus may well be listening to a song he came up with in his bedroom.

"We are in the midst of a true consumer push to create music," said Tim
Bajarin, a technology industry analyst with Creative Strategies. "They now
have the ability to storyboard a song by dragging and dropping."

The phenomenon appalls many longtime musicians and many of the songs are
lame efforts that should remain in the laptop, but there are gorgeous and
surprising exceptions. Most of the work seems to fall somewhere in the
middle. 

Mr. Cobden, who works at Mike's Bistro on West 72nd Street, has created
songs with a friend who is a comedy writer and another who is a
photographer.

"We get together, we drink and smoke a lot, and then we make music," he
said, taking his headphones off to chat. "Everybody sings and contributes,
and we end up with a song. It's sort of like an audio photograph of the
party."

Although Mr. Cobden is an experienced musician - he plays guitar and was
making music long before a studio could be emulated on a laptop - he was
more than happy to trade a clutter of equipment for the intimacy and ease of
his virtual studio.

"Instead of one band, I can have 10," he said. "Instead of lugging a bunch
of equipment to the rehearsal space, I can stay home and make music."

The revolution is still in its nascent stage and has its limits. It is, for
instance, much easier to make a synth-based dance track than an off-the-hook
rock song, perhaps because there is still no great digital substitute for
the bent string of a Fender Stratocaster. But there are people who see value
in music that comes out of laptop. "We live in a world of simulation, so no
one should be surprised by what is going on," Mr. Rotondi said. "Before,
everybody wanted to be a guitar hero. Now they want to be a D.J. or a
producer."

A duo from Bellingham, Wash., using mostly free software they found on the
Web, produced a record a called "Strange We Should Meet Here." Last year
their "band," Idiot Pilot, was signed to Reprise Records. And at the
beginning of the month, Trent Reznor, who records as the band Nine Inch
Nails, offered a free download of the hit single "The Hand That Feeds" that
was broken into multiple tracks, allowing laptop aficionados to mix and mash
up their own version of the song.

Mr. Cobden, who has been playing in bands since he was 13, does not see
major-label gold when he peers into the Reason 3.0 interface on his desktop,
just a way of making music without going through a lot of hoops.

"When musicians get together, there are always a lot of chemistry issues,"
he said. Using software, if he doesn't like the sound of the bass player, "I
just delete him," he added.

Mr. Cobden raced to get a song up and going before he had to go punch in at
the restaurant. Though even there, he said, his virtual life as a rock god
does not have to end.

"My mom hates my music, but the other night one of the hostesses in the
restaurant came in and was rocking out on her iPod and it was one of my
songs, which was a big thrill," he said. "Now if I could just get her to
throw her panties at me."